Serial Killer
ChroniclesAn Early History of Monsters by Peter Vronsky

Coming in 2017 From Penguin Random House - Berkley-NAL Books

Serial Killer Chronicles: An Early History of
Monsters explores the
evolution of serial murder in Western civilization from prehistoric
archeological-anthropological evidence, ancient and medieval court
records and accounts through to the rise of forensic sciences and
criminology in the 19th Century on the eve of the 1888 Jack The Ripper -
Whitechapel murders and into the 20th century in the 1950s when the
seeds for the so-called 1970-1980 "serial killer epidemic" were laid.
Vronsky argues that our concept of supernatural vampires and werewolves
closely follows the FBI's categorization of serial killers as either
"organized" or "disorganized" and presents evidence that killings in the
past attributed to supernatural monsters and lycanthropes were
perpetrated by very human lust serial killers and necrophiles.
Serial Killer Chronicles documents several "serial killer"
epidemics in past history, before the term "serial killer" entered
common usage in 1981, and argues that 19th century forensic
psychiatrist-alienists and criminologists substantially understood the
psychopathology of serial killers before Jack the Ripper and
had already performed rudimentary attempts at profiling these "monsters"
long before the term "serial killer" came into use. Serial
Killer Chronicles argues that the roots of the
notorious so-called "golden age" serial killers of the
"epidemic" in the 1970s-1980s like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy,
Arthur Shawcross, Ottis Toole, Edmund Kemper,
Gary Ridgway were shaped as children by post-World War II and Cold War
era
societal and cultural trauma, fear and loathing.